Take me to heart, and I will always love you

After work, I practiced yoga and then made a super salad. When I lived with Spira, she used to make salads with a welter of healthy ingredients. Even though she was breaking rule #3 in the Book of Salad Etiquette, which states that a salad's ingredients must not number more than four, I was impressed and soon after began making my own "super salads". The one I made tonight was so potent I felt like Popeye after a can of spinach. I didn't go around beating the shit out of people like Popeye was known to do, but I was injected with vim and vigor. See, that's what it's about: feeling good! And feeling good is good enough, to quote a line uttered by who-the-eff-knows in Platoon.

Anyway, the ingredients.

1. mixed greens ( w/ plenty of baby spinach)

2. grape tomatoes

3. oil cured black olives

4. tofu marinated in teriyaki sauce

5. Extra sharp cheddar cheese

6. sprouts (alfalfa, and some others I can't recall)

7. cashews (my favorite nut ever since it beat out the pistachio in a stunning upset a few years
ago)

8. onion (Bermuda style)

9. sweet potato (I love it so much it hurts!)

10. blueberries

11. black beans

12. avocado (I love it so much it hurts!, part two)

13. orange pepper

14. extra virgin olive oil (the only dressing I ever use)

15. cookie dough ( not true but I wanted to see if you were still reading)

Pretty good, huh? Only slightly more nutritious and tasty than a McGriddle, but still worth it.
--

The Celtics/Lakers game is on soon. I will probably miss some of it in favor of working on some songs, a couple of which are new and could amount to something. We'll see. I'd also like to read from Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. I've only read about ten or so pages of it, but I've been floored at least a couple of times by the lyrical, descriptive prose, and how the book has unexpectedly got me thinking about different aspects of my life. Lord Dunsany wrote the book with quill and ink in 1923, or thereabouts, which indicates to me every word, every sentence, was important to him.

To wit:

And the color of Elfland, of which I despaired to tell, may yet be told, for we have hints of it here; the deep blue of the night in Summer just as the gloaming has gone, the pale blue of Venus flooding the evening with light, the deeps of lakes in the twilight, all these are hints of that colour. And while our sunflowers carefully turned to the sun, some forefather of the rhododendrons must have turned a little towards Elfland, so that some of that glory dwells with them to this day. And, above all, our painters have had many a glimpse of that country, so that sometimes in pictures we see a glamour too wonderful for our fields; it is a memory of theirs that intruded from some old glimpse of the pale-blue mountains while they sat at easels painting the fields we know.

Neil Gaiman, in his preface to the book, referred to it as a "rich, red, wine". I already agree, this early on. The above is pure poetry; it speaks to our deeper levels and that is why I find it so beautiful. The King of Elfland's Daughter, along with other works by Lord Dunsany, had been out of print until recently. A shame, but I'm glad he's back.

And with that, I'm off to the fields I know.